ERIC ZIMBERG PHOTO HE LIKED WHAT HE SAW HERE – Photographer Bela Kalman was captivated by the Cape.

Famed photographer cherished his time here

Bela Kalman loved the water, so when he married a Centerville homeowner, he had found a place for his heart. Just a few weeks ago, the world-famous photographer told his stepson that he hoped he would die on the Cape. His wish was granted on June 26. Kalman, once a Life magazine photographer, was 89, and would have turned 90 on July 29.

“He spent a lot of time [on the Cape] boating and waterskiing,” said his stepson, Eric Zimberg of San Diego, who said that he and his family had traveled to Hungary’s waterfront, Lake Balaton, about six times.

“He totally Hungarianized our household,” Zimberg said of the man who married his mother during the childhood of Zimberg and his sister Abby. He taught them Hungarian cooking – Zimberg claims to make a great cucumber salad – and Hungarian swearing, an especially colorful art. “Oh yeah,” said Zimberg with a laugh about the cussing, and added, “that was the first thing he taught me.”

Kalman survived a Nazi work camp and fled Hungary during the revolution against the Soviets in 1956. His obituary in The Boston Globe said that he became an American citizen in 1962.

Just before he left Boston, where he had operated galleries for decades, for another summer on the Cape, Kalman gave a photograph to the Photographic Resource Center, said Glenn Ruga, the center’s executive director.

“He donated, for our annual auction in October, ‘Family Dinner,’ a picture of a Hungarian clan in Chicago in 1957, gathered around a pot of stew,” said Ruga. He believes that the photo was taken for Life magazine but never used because another news story took precedence.

“I think he was leaving for the Cape the next day,” Ruga recalled of the day of the gift. “He lived a life in photography.”

The resource center plans to hold a memorial gathering for Kalman at its facility at 832 Commonwealth Ave. at 6 p.m. July 27.

Elizabeth Ives Hunter, executive director of the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, where Kalman has exhibited, said that she met him “only three or four weeks” after she had started on the job. “He was fascinating,” she said, and added that he had given her “a short course in photography” whose result was that ”I’ve never looked at photography in the same way.

“He had a fairly prodigious intellect,” Hunter said of Kalman, as she explained that with him “even a joke had meaning. The world is a little less attractive place without him. He was a most wonderful person and one hell of a fine photographer.”

The museum may hold a commemoration for Kalman, Hunter said, but there are no firm plans yet.

Kalman’s stepson Zimberg was so young when his mother married the photographer that he literally thinks of the artist as “my safety net.

“I was short for my age,” Zimberg recalled, “and my feet wouldn’t touch bottom when we’d go into the water. I would hold on to him for dear life. He called me ‘kis fiu’ [little boy].”

Zimberg saw much of the world with Kalman. In the sixties, they drove through Hungary in a rented bright yellow VW bus that Beatles fan Kalman dubbed “Yellow Submarine.” Later, the two watched the Apollo 11 moonwalk together in Paris.

When Zimberg was reminded of a joking definition of a Hungarian – someone who goes into a revolving door behind you and comes out ahead – he laughed and then said, “Actually, he was always three steps ahead. And he liked it that way. He was the ultimate director – if he wasn’t directing a photo shoot, he was directing us.”